Analytics and Intelligence
If you have ever sat through a presentation where a six-figure measurement project delivered a slide deck that was already outdated by the time it landed, you already understand the problem with traditional media mix modeling. It is slow, expensive, and built for a world where marketing moved at a quarterly pace. That is not the world most brands are operating in today.
Acadia's media mix modeling services were built for how marketing actually works now. Faster cycles, more affordable engagements, and measurement that lives in a dashboard your team can act on week over week, not a report that gets filed away until next year's planning season. We are a managed services provider, not a software tool. Real analysts, real expertise, and real accountability for the decisions our work informs.
Traditional MMM was designed as an annual exercise. A large consultancy would spend months building a model, deliver a presentation, and disappear until the next budget cycle. For most brands, by the time the findings landed, the media market had already shifted, and the recommendations were already stale.
Acadia's approach to media mix modeling services is fundamentally different. We build models that are designed to be updated and interrogated continuously, not filed away. Our MMM practice gives your team a living view of how each channel is contributing to your business outcomes, so budget decisions are grounded in current data rather than last year's model.
The proof of an MMM program is in the decisions it enables. For a leading kids entertainment brand, Acadia's media mix modeling delivered the first holistic, data-driven view of channel-level ROI their leadership had ever seen. The model identified CTV as a significantly underinvested channel and proved an ROI of 4.01x once budget was reallocated accordingly, resulting in an upper six-figure increase in incremental revenue. That kind of shift, from opinion-based budgeting to evidence-based media planning, is exactly what modern MMM is designed to produce.
For a separate multi-location retail brand relying on last-click attribution and unaware of media's true impact on offline sales, Acadia's MMM revealed that Snapchat had a high ROI and was genuinely scalable, a finding that last-click attribution had completely obscured. Acting on that insight and conducting a market test, the brand increased marketing's contribution to total transactions from 12% to 20%.
Platform attribution tells you what each channel claims credit for. Incrementality testing tells you what each channel actually caused. Those are very different numbers, and the gap between them is often where significant budget is being wasted.
Acadia's incrementality testing services are designed to answer the questions that matter most to your budget decisions: Is this channel driving sales that would not have happened otherwise? What is the true incremental value of my spend on this platform versus that one? Which audiences respond best to which messages, and how do we know?
We design and run incrementality tests across your media mix, building the experimental framework, controlling for confounding variables, and delivering findings that are actionable rather than merely interesting. The goal is always the same: give you the confidence to move budget toward what is working and away from what is not.
For Hertz, a major car rental brand heavily invested across multiple channels, Acadia's incrementality testing proved that 50% of conversions from their paid brand search campaigns were not incremental at all. Those conversions would have happened regardless of whether the ads ran. That single finding allowed the brand to confidently pull back budget from non-performing tactics and reinvest it where it was actually driving growth, improving their ROAS by 9% year over year.
Acadia's incrementality testing uses a synthetic control methodology, identifying test and control markets, manipulating spend in the test markets either increasing or decreasing depending on the hypothesis, and then comparing actual post-test conversions against the synthetic control to measure true incremental lift and the resulting cost per acquisition with full confidence intervals. It is a rigorous, market-tested approach that produces findings you can act on with confidence rather than directional signals you have to argue about in a planning meeting.
Most measurement tools give you data. Acadia Analyze gives you answers.
Our proprietary intelligence platform is built to sit on top of your MMM and incrementality work and make the findings accessible to your entire team, not just the analysts who built the model. AI Highlights automatically surfaces the most important changes in your performance data, so your team spends less time hunting for the story and more time acting on it. Ask Acadia lets you query your marketing data in plain language, getting answers to specific questions without needing to build a custom report every time.
The result is a measurement that your team actually uses. Not a dashboard that looks impressive in a quarterly business review and gets ignored the rest of the time.
Frequently Asked Questions About Media Mix Modeling
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Your media investment deserves measurement that keeps pace with the decisions you are making. If your current approach is leaving you guessing about what is working, or if you are relying on platform attribution to tell a story it was never designed to tell, Acadia can help you build something better.